A/N: Here's the next chapter of The Serpent's Garden. I hope it finds you all in good spirits. Also, if any of you could take the time to post a few more reviews it will help me out with translating the crazy ideas I have spinning around inside my head into something vaguely comprehensible.
Some notes: First, with reference to the timelines of the various worlds, the timeline of Harry Potter has been moved up so that Harry is 15 by the time of the Fifth Grail War, meaning that he was born two years after Shirou, if I'm not mistaken.
Second, with reference to how Harry had the power to summon a Heroic Spirit outside the Grail War, this is to do with the nature and relationship of magic circuits and wizardry, and will be explained in the course of the story. Suffice to say that Harry is an aberration of sorts, not unlike how Shirou possesses magic circuits despite not coming from a magus lineage.
Third, the world in which this story is set incorporates both the Wizarding World and the various magi organisations. The two know of each other, but their mutual hubris and underestimation of the other side (just) prevents open conflict. Ordinarily, wizards cannot use magecraft or vice versa, although each can replicate the effects of the other to a degree with their own magic.
Disclaimer: I own neither Harry Potter nor TYPE-MOON.
When the Servant known as Semiramis reappeared, it was to a drastically different reality.
She was in the shadows of a hallway, concealed by the darkness edged by yellow light radiating from a globe hanging from the ceiling - a light bulb, some outside force informed her. The house she stood in was strange to her sight. So distant in shape from the clay-brick cubes of her home city of Babylon. Information sprang to the forefront of her mind in reply to her curiosity. This was a middle-middle class house of the type common in England, a land far to the north of her home country. The horse-looking woman standing in the doorway was a housewife, her floral-pattern dress utterly unsuited for anything more strenuous than cooking dinner.
What truly occupied her attention, though, was the man of the house - although 'man' was a charitable name for such a hunk of blubber - and the black-haired child suffering his leather-reinforced kicks [in the back of her mind, a far-distant thing screamed MASTER upon the sight of the child]. Blood seeped sluggishly from a wound on the child's forehead, no doubt inflicted by the harsh impact of skull on floor.
Such a sight burned through the layers of 'detached queen' and 'merciless poisoner' that Semiramis had built around herself to reveal what lay beneath, a woman who had never had a mother to guard her. Seeing another in the same position - or worse - than that she had grown up in burnt through those walls of steel.
Succumbing to anger, though, would not befit a queen. The ancient spirit took a hold of her fury and forged it into an iron bar of resolve. She would free this child [MASTER] from these despicable excuses for humanity if it was the last thing she did.
Determined that she would not abandon this child, she stepped from the shadows, her shoes snapping smartly on the pale tiles. The horse-faced woman turned to look at her sharply, a gasp of intaken breath betraying her shock. The obese man took a moment longer, blinded as he was by his fury, but responded to his wife's startled stammers.
Semiramis let the sudden silence drag out, only punctuated by the near-inaudible sobs of the child on the floor. She took a sadistic pleasure in watching the blood drain from the adult's faces. Slowly, purposefully, she stepped towards the man and the boy on the floor. The younger of the two was slowly, tentatively lowering his arms from their protective cocoon around his head. The elder seemed to finally pluck up the courage to speak.
"Wh-who are you? Why are you in here? You've no right to come onto my private property!" the corpulent man tried to bluster. The effect was somewhat ruined by the way that pasty, corpselike white and splotches of angry red waged war over the flabby planes of his face.
"Why should I care more for your 'property' than you care for your own blood?" replied the queen.
"That freak's no family of ours!" raged the obese man, the red splotches winning the battle for dominance "He's just a bloody burden! We never wanted to take him in! He was just left on the damned doorstep!" At his feet, the twig-thin boy recoiled a little with every spiteful word, pulling himself up into an awkward sitting position with his arms drawing his knees up to his chin. His eyes were like twin shards of grass-green ice as he looked up at the altercation.
"Perhaps I could take him off your hands, then?" inquired the sorcerer-queen, weaving a weak glamour into her words to make them unnaturally persuasive. This had always been a specialty of hers, the subtle weaving of spells with only natural words for an aria, dripping them into the mids of her prey like venom into a cup of wine.
As she felt the spiderweb-delicate lattice of the spell settle on them, they seemed to stiffen for a moment before she felt what meagre will they could muster against her magic falter.
"You'll take the boy on?" asked the woman, speaking up for the first time. "I warn you, he's a troublemaker through and through." She seemed a little more reluctant than her husband. Perhaps some distorted vestige of her maternal instincts were shining through? Not enough to earn the Servant's mercy, at any rate.
Semiramis gave the pair a smile that had more of the snake in it than any kind of warmth.
"I'm quite sure I'll manage."
She kneeled down to cup the boy's cheek in a single, pale hand. He shrank back from the contact, afraid. In her mind the Servant cursed the human-skinned monsters that had visited such torment upon a child, such that he would fear even a gentle touch.
"Be calm, child. No harm shall come to you while you remain in my protection." she softly reassured him. Some of the fear left his eyes and she began another glamour, one of sleep. "I shall guard you, child. Sleep soundly." She set the lattice of the spell on its way, letting it seep into his consciousness. The sorceress was surprised, though, to feel a resistance, beyond that of will. Where a strong will made it so that placing a glamour was like holding a rope fast against a flowing tide, this was like a fire, gnawing and biting at her bindings.
"An agugiltu.*" murmured the sorceress to herself in wonder. Perhaps this was what the repulsive house owners had been referring to when they called the child a 'freak'. Regardless, the power of an untrained agugiltu, even a powerful one such as this child was, was nothing before the enchantments of a mistress of the subtle magics and it took only a minimal exertion of prana to send the child to sleep.
He collapsed sideways into her waiting arms and with ease she caught him, hoisting him with her as she stood again, barely noticing the increase in weight. Truly, the benefits of a posthuman body were quite incredible. She turned to the pair in the doorway and, layering stronger compulsions of obedience on them, commanded them to bring her any of the boy's possessions.
"The boy hasn't anything." replied the husband, "Why should we have given him anything?"
"Very well then," replied Semiramis, "You shall give me all information you possess on the child and how he came to reside in your home."
"H-his name's Harry Potter," stammered the wife. "He's my sister's son. He was just left on our doorstep on the day after Halloween four years ago, in a little basket with a letter. It said that Lily and her freak husband had been killed and that we were the closest relatives. Y-you won't tell anyone about the boy, if you take him?"
"Where is this letter?" asked the ancient queen imperiously, ignoring the woman's plea.
Entwisted in the threads of glamour and compulsion, the woman was helpless to resist the command and retreated to the living room, where she retrieved a yellowed sheet from the bottom of a vase of dried flowers. Semiramis took it stowed it in the folds of her garment.
"Is there anything else that I need know?"
"You'll not bring the boy back?" asked the husband.
The ancient queen let loose a burst of mocking laughter. "Why would I?"
"Well, if he brings you trouble, on your head be it."
With a last contemptuous glance at the cowardly pair, the spirit left the house, emerging onto a row of seemingly identical dwells, as if each had been simply copied into the next space. The jaundiced light of sodium streetlamps blotted out any stars that might have peeked through the sparse clouds.
As she left the boundaries of the property, though, she felt the shift of an alien magic on her skin. She had crossed the threshold of a bounded field, a powerful one. It was such an incongruous thing to find in such a mundane locale, like finding a diamond among pigswill.
Maneuvering the child so that a hand was free, the sorceress ran the other through the mudras necessary to cast her simplest examination-spell, in order to divine the purpose of the field. More complex spells were unnecessary, as this magic had none of the subtlety of a spell raised by a magus. This was the work of an agugiltu, like the boy himself.
Perhaps he was important to them? The Grail had informed her of their split from mundane society upon her discovery of the child's nature, though, and she could see no reason for an important child to be raised apart from the society that he was valued by. That was contradicted, though, by the blatantly protective nature of the bounded field encircling the house, though.
It was the poor fortune of the occupants, the Assyrian poisoner thought, that the strength of the field was far from great enough to stymie the curse of a sorceress of the Age of the Gods, empowered by the prana generation of an agugiltu and with more than enough malice to put into her magic.
Switching from the tongue she had spoken with the occupants of the house to the Akkadian of her lifetime, the ancient sorceress began to weave her curse.
"A curse be upon this house and its keepers. Let it drip into their bread and meat, taint their words and their prosperities. Let it make them strange and abandoned by their fellows. Let them be tormented as they have tormented their own blood. But allow them not the solace of death, nor the flight of cowards. Let them repay blood with blood tenfold."
Satisfied with her vengeance, for the moment, the Wise Queen of Assyria turned on her heel and left the whitewashed house behind.
*Wizard or sorcerer. Used to refer to Harry Potter-type wizards.
A/N: Before anyone gets angry about it, Harry is not going to be some kind of stupidly powerful super-wizard from birth. My rationale is something like this: a wizard's magic is powered by prana, similarly to magi, but unlike magi they do not possess magic circuits, but rather a magical core (cliché, I know). The core's purpose is twofold, to convert mana into od and storing that od. However, wizards cannot draw upon mana, nor manipulate prana in the same way as magi. What they can do is use their - by comparison - obscenely large reserves of od (for comparison, an average wizard possesses about 5000 units of od) to fuel their spells, which they shape through a system incorporating a focus (typically a wand), and will, with incantations and wand movements (or similar actions) serving to focus that will. This system allows wizards to accomplish magic which, to magi, would be exceedingly difficult or outright impossible by 'brute forcing' it with excessive amounts of prana.
The problem is that this system is extremely inefficient, as the very same 'brute force' technique that allows wizards their easy magic uses far more od for everything, including things which magi would use orders of magnitude less for. The upshot of all this is that wizards are really good at sustaining large-scale magical existences (like, for example, Servants) but in terms of a magic-to-magic duel are about equal to magi or, perhaps, weaker, as their greater potential power is offset by an utter lack of subtlety and finesse in their magic.